ORIG_HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, MERGE_HEAD etc

Question

There\'s a lot of useful git references (what is the exact name for this?), e.g. HEAD, ORIG_HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, MERGE_HEAD,

Answer 1

These references are called pointers. They are just regular pointers in programmer terms to tree-ish entities that exist within Git. Note that a tree-ish is anything that consists of at least one commit, i.e. a branch, tag, stash or something like HEAD. Regarding a complete list, I think the only one that exists is the manual:

http://git-scm.com/documentation

While there is no complete list of the available special pointers like HEAD The manual does cover the complete list of available pointers therein, although they are kind of hard to find.